On healing as a letting-go, and the real work of becoming your own masterpiece.

The guides came, this time, to talk about healing, and what they showed me is not quite what I expected. Healing, the real kind, the kind that knits body and mind and spirit back together, is less a fixing than a letting-go. It is letting the love light take you by the hand and pull you gently along, correcting your aim as you go, clarifying, a little at a time, your perceptions of yourself and of reality and of the moment you are standing in. It is mysterious and interwoven and hard to put into words, and it is also, somehow, simple.

But underneath the talk of healing, they kept pointing at something larger, and I want to give it to you plainly, because it is the thing they will not stop saying. The real work of a life, the work that heals you and, they promise, heals the world, is to become your own masterpiece.

One

So first, the healing itself. We tend to imagine healing as repair, as finding the broken part and fixing it, and there is a place for that. But the deeper healing they keep showing me is not a repair job. It is a loosening. It is letting yourself be moved, letting the love light nudge your perceptions back toward what is true, weaving you back and forth toward a clearer sense of who you are and what is actually happening around you. You do not have to force this. In fact, forcing it is often the thing that keeps it stuck. You have to let go enough to be led, and let the current of the life force carry you a little. That is the paradox of it: the healing you are gripping for is mostly a matter of opening your hand.

Two

And here is what all that letting-go is in service of. Your life, and your self, is the great work you came here to make. Your magnum opus. Not a novel, not a company, not a thing you build outside yourself, but you, the slow, deliberate, love-soaked shaping of yourself into the fullest and truest version of who you are. The guides could not be clearer about this: to make that your priority, unabashedly, to love and nurture and shape yourself into your own masterpiece, is not selfish, and it is not self-centered. It is the assignment. What else are you doing here? Nobody is going to do it for you. A life that asks nothing of you never calls on your strength and never lets you find out what you are capable of, and this is the work that asks everything of you, in the best way. And here is the part that surprised me: when you actually do it, when you give yourself over to becoming your own masterpiece, you do not become self-absorbed. The opposite happens. You begin to see the same genius, the same unrepeatable artistry, in everyone around you.

Three

There is no requirement to be like anyone else. There could not be, because you could not manage it even if you tried; what you are here to bring, the particular genius only you carry, cannot be copied and cannot be done by anyone but you. So there is room, so much room, to simply be who you are. You are your own teacher in this, and we are each other's teachers, every one of us quietly modeling for the rest what it looks like to become ourselves. You do not have to shrink to fit, and you do not have to borrow someone else's shape. The world does not need another copy of anyone. It is waiting, specifically, for you.

Four

And if you are sitting there thinking, but I do not even know what my gift is, or how to share it, or who I am supposed to become, then let me tell you what the guides told me: congratulations. That is the human condition. It is not a sign you are behind. If we all knew exactly what our masterpiece was and exactly how to make it, there would be no act of creation left to do, no art, no discovery, arguably no reason to get up in the morning to see what the day holds. The not-knowing is not the obstacle. It is the room where the making happens. There is a cathedral in Barcelona, the Sagrada Familia, that has been under construction for well over a century and is still not finished, and there is a sense in which no one truly wants it to be, because its glory is in the endless making of it, the wonky, extravagant, ever-evolving beauty of a thing that is always becoming. That is you. That is your life. You are not meant to be finished. You are meant to be underway.

So take the healing as a letting-go, and take your one wild self as the great work. Become your own masterpiece, unabashedly and without apology, and let yourself be gloriously, permanently unfinished. That is not selfishness. It may be the most generous thing you can do, because a person becoming themselves gives everyone around them the permission to do the same.

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— Juli Martin, The Love Lady